The lonely hearts club

Catalogues full of mail-order brides promise that marital bliss is just a 32-cent stamp away. Satisfied clients say that's true. It seems to depend what you mean by bliss.

by David Andrew Stoler

MEET HONEYLEN, A smiling 13-year-old from Polomok, in the Philippines. Like many girls her age, Honeylen likes to sing, read, and watch movies, especially romances. She also "loves cooking and cleaning." And with a quick, secure Internet credit-card transaction, she can become your wife.

Honeylen is one of more than 700 girls and women available for marriage through World Class Service, a mail-order bride (MOB) website that claims to have received more than 153,000 hits in the past year. The premise is straightforward: plunk down anywhere from $4 to $2500 for the address of a woman from a poor country interested in marrying an American man, write her a letter of introduction, then fly to pick up your waiting fiancée.

The notion of picking out a woman through a catalogue is as old as postage stamps. In America, it dates back to the days of the frontier, when men were men and women were somewhere else. In more recent years, MOB services have advertised in such mainstream magazines as New York and Rolling Stone. Now, the with the advent of the "digital frontier," they're breeding like E. coli on the Web.

But who exactly uses these services, and what are they looking for? That's a discomforting question. You don't have to read much of the material to realize that the trade in mail-order women is a profoundly conservative enterprise -- not a dating service for the adventurous, but a way for men uncomfortable with modernity to acquire wives who'll do what they want. For the women, the transaction isn't nearly so simple.

Skeet: Believe me! When I get married it won't be to an educated woman. I want someone that can bake good biscuits.

-- line from Mail Order Brides, a 1925 stage comedy by J.C. McMullen

WHEN THE British and French colonized the New World, a mail-order wife was one of the prime fringe benefits their governments offered men willing to settle the territories. Washington got into the business during the days of Manifest Destiny: in an effort to encourage pioneers to move west, the government offered women along with the land.

Back then, mail-order brides filled a real need. After all, the first homesteaders were mostly men living hundreds of miles from the nearest barn dance. And the same impulse survives today -- in more enlightened form -- in Alaska Man magazine, which runs photo profiles of unattached guys from America's most man-heavy state in hopes of enticing adventurous women from the lower 48. But Alaska aside, this country is frontier no longer, and even in the wilds of Western Massachusetts, no settlers are too far from civilization to socialize.

But now, the proponents of MOB services say, what keeps single people apart isn't distance but time: in a world of 60-hour-a-week jobs and constant travel, there isn't much time to foster relationships in the conventional ways. Enter the mail-order bride, a kind of ready-to-wear relationship.

To Eleanor Hamilton, who holds a PhD in psychological counseling from Columbia University, the mail-order bride industry is a "throwback to a system of . . . professional matchmakers."

People are too young to commit while they're in school, Hamilton says, and once they graduate into the working world, they "are kept too busy" to meet suitable mates. Mail-order bride services, she told the California newspaper the Point Reyes Light, are a "reasonably efficient way to find a mate when one's local community has failed its socializing responsibilities."

Forget the normal avenues of clubs or common interests, or even the Phoenix personals, and banish the thought that "efficiency" maybe isn't the first thing you think of when looking for a partner -- and then yes, Hamilton may have a point. It worked for her son, who found his wife through an ad in a magazine called Island Girl. They got engaged a week after their first meeting in the Philippines. Says Dr. Hamilton: "All in all, I think they made a good choice, even if arrived at by an unconventional route."

Unconventional, maybe. Easy, certainly. Check out the back of this month's Rolling Stone -- at least 10 advertisements scream out lines like "EAST EUROPEAN LADIES SEEK MARRIAGE!" or "ASIAN WOMEN DESIRE MARRIAGE!"

Call up the advertised number, leave your address on an answering machine, and you're well on your way to marital bliss. Information packets and catalogues from MOB services with frilly names start flooding your mailbox.

From T.L.C. Worldwide, Inc., comes an eight-page, full-color brochure of more than 90 "Latina Ladies" ready to "complement their men."

From Pacific Island Connection, a sample of "Pacific Island Ladies" features four pages from the company's 40-page Summer 1997 catalogue.

A glossy color book from Anastasia (Russia and the Ukraine), FAQ's from Pacific Romance (Filipinas), and on and on and on. All include an assortment of roughly two-by-two-inch photos with blurbs describing each potential mate.

And on the Internet, mail-order bride services are springing up like doughnut shops. Search "mail-order" and "wives" and be prepared for the deluge. The offerings are as specifically and abundantly categorized as goods at a supermarket -- not only "Asian ladies" but separate catalogues for each country and each age group. On the World Class Services website alone, you can order the addresses of a 13-year-old, two 14-year-olds, five 15-year-olds, and eight 16-year-olds.

Though dating 14- and 15-year-olds might seem like the exclusive province of Jerry Lee Lewis and certain Kennedys, the catalogue aspect of mail ordering isn't really so different from ordinary dating rituals. Dating does inherently objectify potential partners; people select strangers to pursue, quite often by looks alone. Take the club scene: two people listening to similar music swill drinks in a packed and sweaty room; if they find themselves attracted to each other . . . there it is. A socially acceptable meeting.

One problem with MOBs, though, is that there's really no "each other" to speak of. It's invariably the men who pick out the women, and it's hard to avoid the notion that the woman chosen becomes the property of the man, almost as if she were a catalogue sweater.

To be fair, it's not quite that simple in practice. Once a man picks a face from the catalogue, he pays a fee for the woman's address, then writes to her. The woman isn't forced to answer any letter, and in that sense she "chooses" the man too. The assumption, as well, is that many men write to each woman, so that she has a wide pool to choose from based on any criteria she desires. It's almost like courting. Of course, courting doesn't usually involve catalogue numbers, but maybe that's the price of efficiency.

"My first wife wanted a car, then she wanted to go to work. She wouldn't cook or clean. But now I have a woman. She ties my shoes for me every morning. I really don't want her to, but she'd be offended if I didn't let her."

-- anonymous Midwesterner's "success story" in the Pacific Romance catalogue

WHEN ALAN Weegens turned 34, he took a step back to assess his life. "I was married twice, divorced twice, bankrupt twice," he says. Weegens was looking for a "family-oriented" woman with whom he could spend the rest of his life, but he wasn't having much luck with the traditional methods of finding one.

"I met two types of women," Weegens says. "One will lie on her back so that you can support another man's kid as long as you'll bring her a paycheck every Friday. The other type has one, two, or three kids. She is successful, but has never been married. She will take you home on Saturday night and treat you nice, but then when you wake up the next morning she will throw you out with last night's dishes."

Weegens -- hard-luck case, self-pitying misogynist -- is exactly the kind of guy these catalogues are targeting: men who want women who won't give them any lip, at least not in English. As the T.L.C. Publication Guide puts it, "We are convinced it would be easier to teach a Latina English than it would be to find a good appreciative American wife."

Fed up with the "Feminista" ideals of American women, American men like Weegens have been forced to look elsewhere for what one catalogue calls "loyal, compassionate, and family-oriented" women. The brochures paint a picture of American women as liberal, selfish, and undesirable: women who want to work and play rather than devote themselves to the family. In short, modern women.

The catalogues read an awful lot like the GOP platform: of the 10 companies that sent me information, every one mentions the "traditional family values" of their women. The blurbs under each photograph explain just what those traditional values are.

Leonebeth, a 20-year-old from the Philippines, writes: "My favorite pastimes include sewing and baking."

Ofelia, 18, also of the Philippines: "I love reading, movies, and cooking. I am honest, faithful . . . and have strong family values.

Aileen, 26, of Singapore: "I like cooking [and] household chores. . . . I'm honest . . . and have Christian values."

American women, according to Weegens, are just the opposite. "Filipinas will divorce you at a rate of 5 percent," he says. "And what's the American divorce rate?"

Weegens figured he'd give the service a try.

"I narrowed it down to three girls before I went down there [to the Philippines]," he says, "and I had a list of names and addresses in my back pocket for backup. I met [the first one] in a hotel lobby and proposed to her 15 minutes later." Done deal -- and, except for the plane ticket, a lot easier than shopping for a car.

Weegens says that he discovered a "wonderful woman -- one who needs a family. She is honest, hard-working, and financially conservative." Plus, he notes with some pride, "[Filipina women] don't get headaches."

Like Sy Sperling and that Remington razor guy, Weegens was so happy he bought the company. Now, he runs "Snooky's Video Pen-Pals," an Internet bride service that Weegens claims will give you a 100 percent chance of finding the right woman.

Skeet: Make them about five foot four. Then they won't be too big to handle if they ever get smart, as women sometimes do.

-- J.C. McMullen, Mail Order Brides

WEEGENS REPRESENTS one perspective on MOBs. Leading women's groups have something very different to say. Angela Nash Wade, coordinator of advocacy and training at the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, calls the mail-order bride industry a potential "breeding ground for exploitation and domestic violence."

"Buying a relationship raises all of the red flags of domestic abuse," Wade says. She worries that the people who use these services are "constructing an imbalance of power and control."

Many abused women face cultural barriers to getting help, and the fact that these women come from a foreign country -- that they are unfamiliar with our justice system, that they don't know English -- "can exacerbate the potential for abuse," says Wade.

And on the matter of the frequent age differences, Wade expresses outright disgust. "[That these men] are only able to deal with someone who is not emotionally developed shows that they are not looking for someone who is going to challenge them in any way," she says. "It's like saying, `Basically I could raise a wife, and raise her to do whatever I want.' "

Marsha Wise, director of volunteer and community services at the Women's Center in Providence, has seen the problems firsthand. She tells of a man who went "shopping" to a very poor country and brought back a woman to be his bride. Once back here, he "quickly became controlling and abusive, gave her lots of misinformation about immigration laws, and told her that she wouldn't be able to expect help in this country."

Wade adds that "these women are alienated from any support system. They have no one to reach out to. When you can buy a woman, you're not interested in compromise and negotiation, so these relationships exist in an extreme of power and control which can cause physical violence and sexual abuse, isolation and manipulation."

Her point was illustrated, chillingly, in a recent Texas case. After divorcing his Caucasian wife, a Texas man met and married a Latina, using a mail-order service. She drowned in a supposed accident. His next wife, Vietnamese, allegedly committed suicide. His fourth wife, a 22-year-old Filipina, disappeared -- only to be dug from the ground nine months later. The man is now being charged with three murders.

Mail-order brides, says Wade, have no way of knowing what they're getting into. "They are sold this candy-coated American dream -- a dream of a husband who will support and nurture them -- but who knows what they'll get?"

It's quite a gamble. But for whatever reason -- repression at home, the promise of a materially better life, the benefits of US citizenship -- plenty of women are willing to take the risk. The trade in mail-order brides may make us squeamish, but it's hardly a form of slavery. All of these women volunteer for the services. Indeed, defenders of the practice invariably argue that the girls will be better off here than they could ever hope to be in their native countries.

Wise sees that argument as a dangerous one. "I would imagine that same defense would be used to justify controlling or possessive or abusive behavior," she points out. "It's like, `I have done so much for you by bringing you over here and saving your life, how dare you not comply with anything I want you to do?' "

But looking through the catalogues, one gets a sense that the women aren't exactly naïve. They dress in skimpy bathing suits, show a lot of skin. It's obvious that they're willing to do what it takes to attract a spouse.

That may be because they see the States as their ticket to a better life. But if a woman's only way out of her country is marriage to an American man -- a very particular kind of American man -- what kind of leverage will she have if that marriage turns out not to be what she'd bargained for?

THE CHARITABLE view is that mail-order bride services are just a different kind of entre nous, a transoceanic dating service for people who still believe that men wear the pants and women hem them. "Everybody wants to have someone," says Alan Weegens, and at some level, one can't help but sympathize.

But the misogynistic tone of the mail-order bride literature, the selling of little girls' addresses to grown American men, the feminist-backlash rationalizations and the pictures of "marriage-minded" 13-year-olds on the Web -- these are painful to see. This business is more than just the consumer instinct run amok. It's an attempt to turn back the clock by decades, to escape the consequences of feminism, to return to the time when women didn't get headaches -- or orgasms.

Perhaps more disturbing, though, is that the impulse driving the business -- the impulse to reduce people to a commodity -- is something that affects us all. Flipping through the catalogues, page after page, face after face, it becomes hard not to think of the brides that way. Even those of us who know better can't help doing a little comparison shopping. It is frustrating, disheartening, even scary.

That's why activists like Wade and Wise keep reminding us about the horrific results of the commerce in women. Says Wise: "All we can do is talk about it and talk against it. [We can] remind people who may be well-intentioned, who may be lonely, that a real partnership is built through mutuality and respect. And maybe there are other ways to go about getting that."

David Andrew Stoler is a freelance writer living in Providence.